> always has been the best and most direct way of finding out about
> excavations and of getting knowledge about it out into the community.
think we should also consider a major failing on our part, as a community
concerned with the past: we still have this adversarial relationship with
investors - we still haven't convinced them of the worth of our work (lots of
money donated to good cultural causes, like supporting the local opera, but not
funneled into writing a good site report or doing a good excavation), we still
don't have the vast majority of the public behind us in the way that whales and
the rainforest or children in the 3rd world working for nike do -
we still haven't won the battle for hearts and minds, and this kind of
navel-gazing discussion within our own closed walls won't solve that problem
either -
if it helps, i'm doing work on a similar debate within german
archaeology, and have written a paper on reconciling rescue work with rearch
goals - the latter was published in polish, will be published in german early
next year, and i've sent a copy to the people at RESCUE - the former will be
published by jeffrey chartrand at bournemouth - one of the major critiques in
the latter is that the germans sit and argue amongst themselves without bringing
in someone from england or the states with more experience with contract
archaeology to tell them that it's all been discussed before, and their time
would perhaps be better spent establishing better guidelines, giving their
archaeologists better training, getting the investos online, etc.
> And yes, the community has an effect- if you have people on site with PhDs
> in site formation processes they might at least worry a bit more about
> some
> things than if you dont! Though their worry might not be good for
> them.
geoff carver
http://home.t-online.de/home/gcarver/[log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%